Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012. xvi, 302 pp. (illus., map.) US$24.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-55849-975-1.
In 1962 the US military began using herbicides in Vietnam to defoliate forests and destroy food crops in order to deny cover and sustenance to revolutionary forces. Between 1962 and 1970, at airports and US operation centres throughout South Vietnam, more than 20 million gallons of herbicide were stored, mixed, handled and loaded into airplanes for the spraying campaign. The effort denuded five million acres of forest and destroyed crops in another 500,000 acres, an area the size of Massachusetts. Areas of Cambodia and Laos along the border were also sprayed. As many as 4.1 million Vietnamese and 2.8 million US military personnel may have been exposed. In 1970 the Nixon Administration ordered a halt to the spraying program. The remaining stocks of Agent Orange were removed from Vietnam and a US staging point, Gulfport, Mississippi, and were incinerated at sea in the Pacific in 1977. This might have been the end of the matter except that Agent Orange and some of the other herbicides were contaminated with dioxin, a highly toxic and persistent organic pollutant. Edwin Martini, in his excellent new book, quotes the mayor of Gulfport, Mississippi: “Like most people, I know very little about dioxin, but from what I can understand, it is one of the most deadly chemicals known to man” (116). The story continues to this day. A 2009 poll of Americans revealed that 80 percent of respondents recognized the term “Agent Orange” and two-thirds of them correctly linked it with Vietnam.
To a degree, even now questions of exposure, causality, compensation and justice polarize debates over the legacy of Agent Orange. Martini’s work “seeks to recover both the history of Agent Orange as a material artifact—the actual herbicide used by the United States in Southeast Asia, which had very real and very serious effects—and the cultural phenomenon of ‘Agent Orange,’ the meaning of which has been steadily made and remade by people around the world” (5). At the outset he puts his finger precisely on the paradox at the center of the Agent Orange legacy: “The more scientists learned about dioxin and the more precisely they could measure and detect it in discrete amounts, the more they were able to identify its potential threat to human and environmental health. Better detection, however, did not lead to greater ability to predict with accuracy what the effects of that exposure would be, particularly in human health” (7).
Chapter 1 describes how the Kennedy Administration came to weaponize herbicides in Southeast Asia as a technological substitute for manpower and the vast logistical system that developed from that decision. Chapter 2 draws on US archival records to reconstruct how soldiers and civilians in Vietnam in the 1960s experienced Agent Orange on the ground. Martini concludes that “there appears to be little, if any, concrete evidence that herbicidal warfare was in fact militarily effective” (81). Chapter 3 moves to the aftermath of war—the challenges the military faced in disposing of the remaining stocks of Agent Orange in Vietnam and the US and how citizens of Times Beach, Missouri, and New Plymouth, New Zealand, responded to dioxin contamination in their communities. In chapter 4 Martini shows how competing discourses of exposure, risk, human health and scientific uncertainty affected the legal and political battles of veterans in the US and Australia. Chapter 5 extends the analysis in chapter 4 to examine how the Agent Orange legacy is playing out worldwide in the 2000s, particularly in Vietnam. This is a bold book. In the conclusion Martini brings his historian’s perspective to three contentious questions: How could the US and its allies do such a thing? Should the use of Agent Orange be considered chemical warfare? What can and should be done for US veterans, Vietnamese victims and others around the world who believe they are suffering as a result of Agent Orange?
Martini has written the most complete history of Agent Orange to date. It is excellent. His book fills an important gap in the historical literature on the Vietnam War and contributes to a larger literature on the consequences and legacies of modern warfare. It should be at the top of the reading list for people of all persuasions engaged with the Agent Orange issue today. It will be of use to students and policy makers and, one hopes, a caution to military planners.
One element is missing from this story. Over the last half decade American foundations and a group of eminent private citizens in the US and Vietnam have broken through the logjam of scientific dispute and recrimination over Agent Orange that for decades has clouded relations between Vietnam and the United States. They have set their governments on a path to clean up the dioxin contaminated soils at former US military installations in Vietnam and provide new resources for those affected “regardless of cause.” Since 2007 over $100 million dollars have been raised for these purposes from both private donors and the US government. More than 40 years after the spraying of Agent Orange was halted, its legacy has been transformed into a humanitarian concern we can do something about.
Charles R. Bailey
The Aspen Institute, New York, USA
pp. 187-189